The Birmingham Post reports that the Creative Industries are Booming in the West Midlands with 60,000 people working in the sector, expected to increase by 7% over the next year. All good. Except D’log wonders where exactly they’re getting their figures from. It’s a fair point. Where do you draw the line on what counts as “creative”? And how do you count all the self-employed and part-time people?
(And if there really are 60,000 creatives, does that mean I have to blog about them all? Cripes!)
I really don’t like that term “Creative”, it always feels like its the lazy catch all to define “those people over there” typically used by employers/clients to define us people who do the messy stuff for them.
Birmingham seems particularly hung up on the term, there must be around 20-30 arts projects with Creative in the title, isn’t there a better term? At least one we could use internally amongst us people who make stuff?
I know where you’re coming from on this. It’s only now I’m seeing and using it every day that I don’t cringe at the “creative” tag. Isn’t being creative just something that all humans do? Do we include cooks? Couples trying for babies?
That said, it’s just a word. And handy umbrella term that can be used in this context without worrying about the semantics too much. There’s nothing novel about The Novel after all.
But I’m someone who calls himself a Blogger so I can’t really talk…
Surely it’s an adjective, rather than a noun.
The people in question are creators rather than creatives, I would have thought.
I guess the issue is that not all creators work in “The Creative Sector”.